alt Hacker NewsWhen the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.
By the time of its delayed release, Musk had become deeply unpopular with many of that original coalition of fans and buyers, the truck was more expensive than originally promised, his new ‘base’ probably couldn’t afford to buy many of them, and it was structurally a fairly normal car underneath the steel panels. It also suffered plenty of embarrassing issues, which people were of course gleeful to publicise.
It could have been a cool funky status symbol, but Musk screwed it all up.
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The Cybertruck announcement was a couple years after the Thai Rescue Divers "pedo" incident, which was the tipping point for many people (including on the left) to realize he wasn't actually the Tony Stark character he pretended to be and actually a pretty shitty person.
This was well into the Tesla flamethrower/short shorts/funding secured/etc period of $TSLA meme stockification. Also pushing Dogecoin/crypto.
He certainly wasn't the "darling of the left" by then. But you are correct that his image was significantly less tarnished by political meddling and later obsession with woke/trans/culture war of the day stuff.
He was the darling of the emerging meme stock day trader/gambler/WSB crowd which in broad strokes tends to anti-correlate with the "left".
Agreed. When it was first announced, I was kind of interested. I laughed at imagining it as a screenshot from an N64 game.
But it didn't live up to the selling points, it is very expensive, has design issues that weren't necessary for the aesthetic, and the company's owner turned out to be a really horrible person contributing meaningfully to changes in my country that are dangerous.
> Musk was still the darling of the left
I can assure you he was not.
This is rewriting of history. It was ridiculed even by the reddit shitlibs that hung on to Papa Elon's every word. Breaking the glass twice was a meme.
> When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.
People still hated it when it was announced, the online discourse was largely negative surrounding it. I remember being in my tech office at the time and we were all talking about how bad it looked.